the Chinese, the Indogermanic, Semitic and Dravidian, the Pullo and the Congo-Kafrian or Ba'-ntu family of languages, extending over areas much wider or as wide as the Tinné, Shóshoni, Algónkin, Dakóta, Cháhta-Máskoki and Guarani stock, while small areas are, perhaps, as numerous in the Eastern hemisphere as in the Western. Their size evidently depends on the configuration and surface-quality of the lands, which again determine the mode of the subsistence of their inhabitants.
The natives of a country, when not influenced by the civilization of the white race, will in barren plains, steppes, prairies and woodland, generally become hunters; on the shores of the sea and on the banks of the larger rivers, they will resort to fishing, and sometimes, when settled on the coast, turn pirates or form smaller maritime powers, while the inhabitants of table-lands will till the fields, plant fructiferous trees, or collect esculent roots for their sustenance. Of these three modes of sustenance we see frequently two combined in one tribe. The fishers live peacefully and in small hordes, because large settlements, on one spot of a river bank at least, could not be supplied at all seasons of the year with a sufficient supply of fish from the river. Hunters become, from their nomadic habits, accustomed to a restless, adventurous life, and in their thus acquired warlike disposition will constantly threaten their weaker neighbors; if opportunity offers itself will declare war, overwhelm and enslave or destroy them, and thereby extend the dominion of their own language over a wider area. Agricultural pursuits bear in themselves the germs of steadiness, of order and progress; countries settled and improved by agriculturists will gradually, when the population becomes more dense, consolidate into oligarchies or monarchies, generally of a despotic character. Such political bodies have frequently absorbed neighboring communities engaged in similar pursuits, and turned with them into powerful empires, as in the case of the Aztecs, Mayas, Chibchas and Quichhuas, in the Western hemisphere. For obvious reasons pastoral pursuits were almost entirely unknown in America, but were powerful agents of culture in Asia and Europe, since they facilitated the transition from the hunter or nomadic state to the state of agriculturists.
California and portions of the Columbia river basin, with their numerous rivers and the enormous quantity of salmon, trout and lamprey eel ascending annually their limpid waters, were essentially countries occupied by fisher-tribes, and before the advent of the white man, are supposed to have harbored a dense native population. Among these fisher-tribes we also find the smallest areas of languages; six of them are
